Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body / Edition 2

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More About This Textbook

Overview

Unbearable Weight is brilliant. From an immensely knowledgeable feminist perspective, in engaging, jargonless (!) prose, Bordo analyzes a whole range of issues connected to the body--weight and weight loss, exercise, media images, movies, advertising, anorexia and bulimia, and much more--in a way that makes sense of our current social landscape--finally! This is a great book for anyone who wonders why women's magazines are always describing delicious food as 'sinful' and why there is a cake called Death by Chocolate. Loved it!"--Katha Pollitt, Nation columnist and author of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001)

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Bordo explores women's obsessions with appearance, their struggles to control food and hunger, and the pressures brought on by a society that worships the ideal female figure. (Mar.)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780520240544
  • Publisher: University of California Press
  • Publication date: 1/1/2004
  • Edition description: Tenth Anniversary Edition
  • Edition number: 2
  • Pages: 398
  • Sales rank: 589,764
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Susan Bordo is Professor of Philosophy and Singletary Chair of Humanities at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1987) and co-editor of Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (1989).
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Read an Excerpt

An excerpt from the foreword by Leslie Heywood:

"To read Susan Bordo is to take a wild ride through the cultural images that form our daily lives, and to see them with a startling X-ray vision that reveals their blood and guts and bones, a vision that reveals us, finally, to ourselves. . . Piece by piece, strand by careful strand, she shows the sources of our deepest anxieties in the history of philosophy, in gender and race ideologies and the way these get expressed in the cultural images that surround us.

Unbearable Weight is, in its essence, a profound gift of insight, generosity, understanding. Though this edition marks the tenth anniversary of Unbearable Weight, these pages are as uncanny, insightful, and welcoming now as they were then. In living with us in the crazy, fast-moving world that is contemporary media

culture, Susan Bordo is our guide, our companion, and our friend."

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Table of Contents

Foreword: Reading Bordo
In the Empire of Images: Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body 1
Pt. 1 Discourses and Conceptions of the Body
Whose Body Is This? Feminism, Medicine, and the Conceptualization of Eating Disorders 45
Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subject-ivity 71
Hunger as Ideology 99
Pt. 2 The Slender Body and Other Cultural Forms
Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture 139
The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity 165
Reading the Slender Body 185
Pt. 3 Postmodern Bodies
Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism 215
"Material Girl": The Effacements of Postmodern Culture 245
Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies, Postmodern Resistance 277
Notes 301
Index 343
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